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2010-04-04

The Fallen

Due to circumstance and inclination, my three decades of urban gardening have been devoted to mostly ornamental private gardens. I have dabbled in the occasional strawberry jar potted up with herbs (successful) and sweet corn in container (wretched). Nevertheless, most of my experience is with perennials and bulbs.

I label my plants. Rather, I label where I plant them. This is most helpful in the off seasons, to dissuade me from scanning some patch of deceivingly barren soil and imagining all the new plants I could acquire to populate it.

In the first garden, in the East Village, I carefully labeled all the little bulbs and plants with plastic labels. The white plastic contrasted strongly with the dark earth. This led one visitor to describe it as a "plant cemetery."

I've since graduated to aluminum labels. They are durable, erasable and reusable. Perhaps most important, less conspicuous. I've also gotten into the habit of scribing the provenance onto the back of the label: the year, and usually also the source from which I purchased the plant.

Nevertheless, they sometimes still serve as markers for those plants that have passed on. This is so common that gardeners have a euphemism for it: "adventurous." I am an adventurous gardener, in that I will plant things I've never grown before, perhaps never ever heard of before reading about it or spying it in some nursery and "rescuing" it.

Here then is a sampling of The Fallen, transcribed from markers I've found in different stashes, collecting dust with years-old seed packets, rusting pruners, and forgotten catalogs.

4 comments:

I tend to use the labels the plants came with... and then after a year or so, pull them up and store them in a file cabinet, with the location and date written on the tag. Sometimes when I'm searing for a plant name by going through the tags, I see fallen friends as well. And I noticed this spring that I planted prairie smoke last fall very very close to chionadoxa, which of course were not visible by then. Oops.

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About Me

I moved to New York City, to the East Village, in 1979. I started city gardening soon thereafter. I moved to Brooklyn in 1992. I now make my home and garden in Flatbush, Brooklyn (USDA Hardiness Zone 7b, AHS Heat Zone 5).